


Note How She Quotes The Leaves

by inlovewithnight



Category: Slings & Arrows
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-10
Updated: 2010-02-10
Packaged: 2017-10-07 04:04:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Set pre-season 1</p>
    </blockquote>





	Note How She Quotes The Leaves

**Author's Note:**

> Set pre-season 1

Richard is standing in the doorway with that frightening grin on his face that all but confirms that he's exactly as much of a halfwit as Ellen has always feared. Not that she spares much time or energy for thoughts of _Richard_. Good God, why would she bother? She is an artist and he is...whatever the hell he is. A glorified accountant with bad hair. One of the money men, and she can only think that term with a sneer of disgust that isn't her own. She can't remember if it was Geoffrey or Darren who used to say that in the middle of a drunken rant, but either way, she hates it on principle.

And it's not the point right now, anyway. She looks at Oliver again. "Have you completely lost your mind?"

"I'm not going to dignify that with a response, Ellen."

"It's a well-known fact that this--" She waves the book under his nose, satisfied when he flinches back an inch. "--is the _worst_ of all the plays."

"Ellen."

"Some scholars don't even count it as part of the canon!"

"Who told you that?" Oliver's voice is calm and measured, his head tipped to that fucking infuriating angle so he's all but looking down at her out of those watery blue eyes, and who ever gave him the right to get so damn old? "I know you didn't read it yourself."

"How do you know?"

"You don't read, Ellen."

She wonders when exactly she went from someone he would subvert his own sexuality to fuck to a petulant child he can talk to this way.

"It's a terrible play," she says, waving the book at him again.

"It's very trendy right now," Richard chimes in, and Ellen turns slowly to stare at him. From the edge of her vision, she can see Oliver roll his eyes, but he doesn't chime in.

"Trendy," she says.

"Yes!" Richard nods eagerly, and she wonders if he was born like this, or dropped on his head as a child, or if years of worrying about money just _do_ that to a person. She makes a policy of never worrying about anything, so she doesn't know.

"_Titus Andronicus_ is trendy." Further proof that he's completely useless, or possibly a robot: he can't even pick up on her disdain for him when she puts a full performance into it. He just keeps yammering on.

"Julie Taymor's film version has really sparked some new interest in it! We're going to ride those coattails to--"

"Is that what this is about?" She whirls to face Oliver, who winces slightly as she continues at full voice. She isn't going to give either of them a choice but to listen to her. This is ridiculous. "The fucking _movie_? I should have guessed. You would've agreed to do _any_ play if you got the idea that it could be done with a couple of pretty little British boys dressed up like tigers and humping each other."

"Oh, we're not going to include that part, are we?" Richard asks, grabbing his glasses, and Ellen wonders how bad it could really be to kick the man who signs her paychecks right in the balls.

"Enough," Oliver says, and despite herself, Ellen's voice chokes off in her throat. Fucking _directors_. "Ellen, first read-through tomorrow, be ready, and _do_ remember that you're playing a queen this time. A screaming harridan of a queen, but let's simulate some royal dignity anyway."

She narrows her eyes at him. "No smart remarks about the screaming harridan part not being a stretch?"

"Why I should I when you'll make them for me, my dear?"  
**  
She's made it very clear any number of times that it is not her responsibility to mentor anyone. They can figure things out for themselves the same way she did, or they can...not, it really makes no difference to her whatsoever.

Still, that doesn't mean that if there's an opportune time to share some of her wisdom and experience, and they're properly attentive, and Oliver has gone off missing somewhere so there's nothing better to do, she can't tell a few stories.

"Have you ever done _Titus_ before, Ms. Fanshaw?" the quiet one asks. The dark-haired one. Ellen should probably know their names by now, or at least the ones worth knowing, but she can't seem to retain any of them for more than a minute.

"In a workshop, once," she says, keeping one eye carefully on the door. Oliver being late, when he'd been all snotty about her being on time...that takes some nerve. "Just after I finished school."

"Were you Lavinia?" the other one asks--the loud one, the redhead, the one Ellen doesn't like. She can't remember that name either. "I'm Lavinia this time."

"Well, there are only two female roles in the play," Ellen points out, glaring at the door. Oliver must _know_ that she's here, waiting, entertaining the infants of the cast like a babysitter. He's doing it on purpose.

"Oh, right." The loud one frowns at her copy of the play, and the quiet one--Kelly or Kitty or Kate, something like that--leans in closer.

"How was it?"

"The workshop?" Ellen blinks, looking away from the door for a moment, trying to remember. Well. She remembers perfectly well, she just has no idea whatsoever how to answer that question. "It was...experimental."

"It's _gross_," the loud one says, scowling at her book. "This whole play is gross."

"Well, it is a tragedy, Claire," the quiet one offers with a small, hopeful smile.

"My boyfriend at the time played Demetrius." Ellen frowns, remembering. "And his nemesis played Chiron." The very last time Darren Nichols and Geoffrey Tennant would grace even a workshop stage at the same time.

"Your boyfriend had a nemesis?" the quiet one asks.

"Two, if you count gin." She shakes her head, trying to clear it of images of Darren and Geoffrey pursuing each other across the stage with the meter sticks that were standing in for rapiers, and the director watching for a solid ten minutes before realizing that they were not, in fact, riffing on the text but had forgotten it entirely and were trying to kill each other. Welts for days. "It basically failed. The whole workshop. It was a disaster."

"Wasn't that kind of...I don't know, weird?" Claire asks, twirling her hair around her finger. "Having your boyfriend pretend to rape you and chop your hands off and call you a whore and everything? I mean, how do you _rehearse_ that, you know?"

Ellen blinks again, thinking about her cot in their crappy common apartment, and the living room of their crappy common apartment, and Darren's sleeping bag just once out of spite, and behind the desk in the workshop director's office. "There is a reason it's called _acting_, sweetie," she says, drawing herself up and making the words as frosty as she can. "And if we're not having a read-through today, I'm going home."

She sees Maria roll her eyes at that and distinctly mouth "drama queen" to herself. Honestly, the _attitudes_ with these people. She wouldn't put up with it if other theater companies with equivalent work and pay weren't few and far between and inconvenient to look for.

The door opens and Oliver comes wandering in, barely looking interested, a shadow of what he ever was, and for some reason that hits her hard enough this time that she doesn't even object when he mutters "Sit down, Ellen, nobody gives a damn" on his way past her to his chair.  
**  
Ellen never stays after rehearsal. But today she lingers in the doorway, tapping the book against her thigh, watching Oliver talk quietly to a few of the others and to Maria.

When they're all gone and he reaches for his coat, she speaks. "This isn't supposed to be some kind of a message to me, is it?"

He doesn't seem startled, or even look up. "What do you mean?"

"Tamora. The queen who gets power-hungry and above herself and has to be put back in her place, all...sad and miserable and bloody and then executed by a crazy man."

"Is that what you're getting out of it?" He buttons his coat carefully and finally looks at her. "If that's what you're going to use as your characterization, this is going to be quite the little disaster, I'm afraid."

"What did you _want_ me to get out of it, then?" she snaps, throwing the book at him. "_Direct_ me, Oliver."

He raises his eyebrows mildly and picks the text up from the floor, smoothing his palm over the cover. "Tamora," he says, "is accustomed to thinking of herself as the center of the universe. She was Queen of the Goths. She had an entire nation of followers with absolute loyalty. And then that's cut down to four, her sons and Aaron. Then Titus kills one of her sons."

"So now we're halfway through act one, scene one," she says, rolling her eyes.

He continues in the same even tone. "Tamora's great failing is that she maintains that view of the world and doesn't realize that she's just one person among many, just a piece in the machine. Even when she's dragged off to Rome, she doesn't quite make that shift. She doesn't see beyond herself, even to notice that her own sons are more than happy to throw her over for someone younger and prettier and...all that."

He holds the book out to her and she frowns as she takes it, puzzling over his words. "I suppose I can use some of that."

"I suppose you can, yes." He smiles at her, that odd, sad little smile he's picked up some time between then and now, and she doesn't have any idea when, and it frightens her as much as she allows anything to, which isn't much. "Just bits and pieces."

If he was just a few years younger again, she would shake him for being so infuriating. "Are you suggesting that I can't do this? Because I am a professional, Oliver."

"I know you are, Ellen. I'm sure you'll do splendidly."

His voice is tired, neutral bordering on indifferent. She remembers when he would _fight_ with her about these things, stir up the energy a good performance demands. Where the hell did that go? "Oliver, are you all right?"

"Am I all right." He stares off into space like he's turning it over in his mind. "What an interesting question, Ellen."

"The most interesting thing about it is that you're not answering it."

He looks back over his shoulder at the entrance to the theater. "A better head her glorious body fits/Than his that shakes for age and feebleness..."

"Don't go all melancholy on me now, Oliver."

"No? No, of course not. No time for that." He nods to himself and then looks at her again. "Pull this one off and I promise next season we'll put _Midsummer Night's Dream_ on the schedule. You've been wanting to get your hands on Titania for years. Much more your type of queen."

"Is that a..."

"It's not an anything, Ellen. Well, maybe an agreement between friends." He looks at her expectantly. "Do we have a deal?"

She thinks for a moment. "Do we get pretty little British boys dressed up like tigers?"

"I'm certainly going to do my best to sneak that by Richard."

"Then it's a deal." She takes his hand and they shake on it. "Go home and get some rest, Oliver. You look exhausted."

"We both need our rest. It's going to be a long rehearsal process of resisting the urge to actually cut out Claire's tongue."

"Don't tempt me." She tosses her head and assumes her most regal stance. "I am, after all, the dread Queen of Goths."

"So you've found a way to play her after all?"

"I'm getting there." She smiles, realizing the truth of the words even as she says them. "The queens always come easiest to me."


End file.
